Running back to the centre mark is a habit worth breaking

Recovering to the middle of the baseline is only correct when the ball you just hit went down the middle, which it rarely did.

Every junior gets told to recover to the centre. It is the first movement instruction most players ever receive and it is wrong more often than it is right.

The correct recovery point is not the middle of the court. It is the middle of the angles available to your opponent, which is a different place, and it moves depending on where your ball landed and how much time the opponent has. Hit a deep ball into the opponent's forehand corner and the two extreme replies he can produce are a crosscourt to your backhand and a line drive to your forehand. Bisect those two and the point sits noticeably to one side of the centre mark. Standing on the centre mark leaves you a longer run to one of them for no benefit at all.

That sounds obvious written down. Watch a club match and count how many players sprint past the correct spot to touch the middle, then have to change direction.

The second half of the idea is depth, and it gets ignored even more. If you have pushed the opponent back and he is hitting from four feet behind his baseline, you should be inside yours, because his angles are compressed and his ball will take longer to arrive. If you have hit short and he is stepping in, you need to be deeper, because the ball will arrive early and wide. The recovery position moves forward and back as much as it moves sideways, and almost nobody drills it that way.

There is a decent counter, which is that under real pressure a simple heuristic beats a calculation, and centre is a serviceable default when a player is stretched and thinking about nothing. I accept that for beginners. Beyond that it becomes a ceiling, and you see it in players who look quick and are always slightly late to the second ball of a pattern.

The way to coach it is to stop calling it recovery. Call it positioning for the next shot and make the player say out loud where the opponent can hit, before he moves. It slows the drill down and it looks unathletic for a fortnight.

Then he stops running the extra two metres to a mark painted on the court for the purpose of starting a service game.